Buildering - weve all done it. When my climbing partner was my roomate back in the 70s we would get so psyched to climb that we would walk down El Cajon boulevard, climbing the fronts of buildings. Of course when youre liebacking a window frame at 1am, you look alot like a burglar, and we got stopped by the cops more than once, but always talked our way out of trouble. I was traversing a big stone building in St Petersburg, Russia once, and drew the attention of machinegun toting police. It was grim for a minute, then they saw my climbing shoes and gave a hearty thumbs up and let me go.

I remember us being checked out for quite awhile before being released after buildering on the stone facade of the Cal 1st bank at night on El Cajon Blvd.
Hell we had to climb anything that was in front of us back then.
I remenber the X pillers at the La Jolla Museum of Art as being a flashy looking solo back then too! Got a lot of attention from the tourist!

I got the worst ankle sprain of my life when I came off that liquor store
window in Pacific Beach.

We used to do a lot of buildering on the campus at Stanford University back in the 1970s. Eventually there was so much chalk everywhere on the pink sandstone blocks that the adminstration ordered us to clean up the mess or they would ban buildering altogether. So there we were with our toothbrushes and buckets of water...

In Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) I used to go buildering on the rock wall of a semiconductor manufacturing plant. It was such an incredible finger and forearm pump. One day the guard came by and asked, "What are you guys doing, practicing for El Calpitan?"

"YES!" we replied.

At San Jose State University there were some PUNISHING vertical/parallel fist cracks in concrete, and some very high but easy chimney climbs on the SUB. I always fantasized about finishing the climb by chimneying out under the overhang and mantling onto the roof, but I never got the balls to do it: http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/files/2011/04/student_union5_web.jpg

A couple of unnamed Squamish climbers were climbing on the pre-climbing-gym "Eaton's Wall" located in Park Royal South - a shoppin' mall - at the same time a jewel heist was going on in a store situated in the mall.

Of course our fine friends had found themselves at the vaguely illicit wall in the wee hours of a Sunday a/m after the buses had stopped running. ( you could climb there when stores were closed - e.g. on Sunday or at night ) ( This was over 30 years ago when Sunday closings still happened ) The boys both hoped to builder for a bit to stay warm & pass time until the buses started up again.

The local constabulary picked up our fine friends. This local constabulary, the West Vancouver Police Dep't notorious for nasty behaviour towards human beings ( which has continued to this millennium )

So our friends were incarcerated and grilled extensively about the robbery. They were denied contact with their families. They were told fibers from the carpets in the store where they did the job were found in the treads of their shoes. If they'd cooperate with the fuzz, they'd find themselves better off when it came to sentencing.

Sometime Sunday evening the police got the idea they had indeed captured the wrong chaps, let them call their parents and, sent them on their way.

K-man and I used to do a ton of buildering at Sonoma State University. There were some really good problems there, this one is around an 11a finger crack. Somewhere I have some pics of Kelly topping out on the library, mounting an overhang four stories up

Similar thing happened to me, circa 1977. One of the finest buildering walls in downtown Cardiff, Wales happens to be the exterior wall of the prison. They used high quality stone, excellent for finger-training. It's about 25 or 30 feet high. The best part of the wall is right on the sidewalk. Lots of people walking by, all day. Spent an hour there, traversing to and fro (I never got my feet more than a few inches off the ground, seemed harmless enough....), and was just putting my regular shoes back on, when the cops arrived. Uh oh.

I was expecting a quick two-minute what-were-you-doing interview. Instead, I spent about four hours in the local police station. It did not help that the section of wall I was on housed the high-security section. Nor that I was living in Newcastle on Tyne at the time, and that one of the prison's prize, most violent, high-risk-of-escape prisoners, just the other side of said wall, was from Newcastle.

It slowly dawned on me that they took this very seriously. They were patient, polite, but relentless in their questioning. As was I in my answers. Finally they sent someone around to the local climbing store, Outdoor Action, where Pat Littlejohn and whoever else was there (once they picked themselves up off the floor, where they'd collapsed in laughter) vouched for me being just a stupid climber, and probably not trying to break out anyone.

During my first quarter at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1954, I would climb out of the upper dormitory window about 11 pm, sometimes with a friend, carrying a rope, and go up on the hill to climb on some of the buildings and the football stadium. Great fun. One time I was doing a free rappel off the stadium down to a narrow road below when the area lit up as a campus cop car approached. I stopped about 30 feet up and pulled up the remaining rope which had been hanging directly in the cars path, waited until it passed, then completed the rappel. Fond memories. I used a little gymnastic chalk at the time, possibly the first time ever that chalk was used buildering, although some of the "human flies" before my time may have chalked up. No one knows - one of the little mysteries of the past.